Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web, 3rd Edition

In this updated edition to their original best-selling classic, the co-creators of CSS clearly, logically, and painlessly explain the hows and whys and ins and outs of the visual formatting language that is their gift to us. The Web would be a poorer place without Messieurs Bos and Lie. Your shelf will be richer for the addition of this book.

Rely on it. Study it. Savor it.

The Indispensible CSS Tutorial and Reference—Straight from the Creators of CSS

Direct from the creators of CSS, this is the definitive guide to CSS, today's indispensable standard for controlling the appearance of any Web or XML document. This book doesn't just show how to use every significant CSS 1 and 2.x feature; it carefully explains the "why" behind today's most valuable CSS design techniques. You'll find practical, downloadable examples throughout—along with essential browser support information and best practices for building high-impact pages and applications.

Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web, Third Edition covers every CSS 2.1 improvement and fix, from new height/width definitions in absolutely positioned elements to new clip property calculations. Clear, readable, and thorough, it's the one must-have CSS resource for every Web developer, designer, and content provider. Coverage includes

• Mastering essential CSS concepts: Rules, declarations, selectors, properties, and more

• Working with type: From absolute/relative units to font size and weight

• Understanding CSS objects: Box model, display properties, list styles, and more

• Exercising total control over spacing and positioning

• Specifying colors for borders and backgrounds

• Managing printing: Margins, page breaks, and more

• Implementing media-specific style sheets for audio rendering, handhelds, and other forms of presentation

• Moving from HTML extensions to CSS: Five practical case studies

• Making the most of cascading and inheritance

• Using external style sheets and @import

• Integrating CSS with XML documents

• Optimizing the performance of CSS pages

• Includes a handy CSS Quick Reference printed on the inside covers

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Online Sample Chapter

The Amazing Em Unit and Other CSS Best Practices

Sample Chapter(s)

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Index

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Preface

Since its introduction in 1996, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has revolutionized web page design. Now, in 2004, most web pages use CSS, and many designers base their layouts entirely on CSS. To do so successfully requires a good understanding of how CSS works. The purpose of this book is to describe how designers can take full advantage of CSS 2.1, which is the newly released update of the specification.

CSS's journey from an idea to a specification–and then on to a specification designers can rely on–has been long and arderous. The creator of the CSS Zen Garden (described in Chapter 12, "From HTML extenstions to CSS") describes it this way:

Littering a dark and dreary road lay the past relics of browser-specific tags, incompatible DOMs, and broken CSS support. Today, we must clear the mind of past practices. Web enlightenment has been achieved thanks to the tireless efforts of folk like the W3C, WaSP and the major browser 1 creators.

Indeed, we believe the web is a more enlightened place now that CSS have matured to a stage where it can be used for advanced layouts in a range of browsers. This book will tell you all you need to know to start using CSS.

Table of Contents

1. The Web and HTML.

2. CSS.

3. The Amazing Em Unit and Other Best Practices.

4. CSS Selectors.

5. Fonts.

6. The Fundamental Objects.

7. Space Inside Boxes.

8. Space Around Boxes.

9. Relative and Absolute Positioning.

10. Colors.

11. Printing and Other Media.

12. From HTML Extensions to CSS.

13. Cascading and Inheritance.

14. External Style Sheets.

15. Other Approaches.

16. XML Documents.

17. Tables.

18. The CSS Saga.

19. HTML 4.0 Quick Reference.

Appendix A. System Colors.